Search form

news (external)

The world, according to University of Washington professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, is awash in BS. So begins their popular course, “Calling Bullshit,” which trains college students to identify and call out misinformation. BS warps voter choices. It can damage businesses. BS oozed from a crudely edited video that falsely suggested House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was inebriated at a public event. Foreign propaganda machines spread BS through social and news media during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond. And BS, when it clouds the science of vaccine safety and climate change, even threatens our health. Many people believe the BS they encounter and transmit it further — and that’s what this class aims to stop. They are developing an open online course, and they have shared their lessons in public events to reach an audience beyond the typical college-age student.

BY STEVEN M. BAULE, eSchool News
There are four major areas educators can check to ensure digital materials include accessible content for all students. Today, most learning management systems (LMS) and software programs offer some level of accessibility compliance checking. However, they are not always thorough or error-free. ent is accessible for all students. For instance, some PowerPoint templates show less-than-ideal contrast between text and background colors. Many YouTube videos include closed captioning, but the automatic captioning often leaves something to be desired. Taking the time to review accessibility of materials makes sense to ensure all students can experience success instead of frustration.

BY LAURA ASCIONE, eSchool News
Here’s how education is using augmented reality apps to take academics and engagement to the next level. Augmented reality has been one of higher ed’s big buzzwords for a number of years, but it’s not until just fairly recently that institutions have used the technology in practical ways. Now, higher-ed augmented reality apps are having a moment that extends past the novelty of Pokemon Go–and K-12 could take some of those lessons into its own classrooms. Most augmented reality apps address a variety of things, such as bringing science concepts to life, improving student retention, and offering campus tours or glimpses of historical moments on campus.

BY KEN UNDERHILL, eCampus News
In cybersecurity education, the line between teacher’s pet and tomorrow’s threat is far more nuanced–even invisible. Every field of study has its challenges, and cybersecurity education faces a big one: how can educators can share detailed curricula around things like malware and cyberattacks without serving up a potential recipe book for those with ill intent? Sensitive information shared with the wrong people in the classroom (physical or online) can fuel a malicious actor’s own educational learning curve. That’s obviously something to be avoided, but cybersecurity educators and their students still need to find a way to study concepts and use cases at the level of granularity sufficient for the real-world jobs they’re training for.

In this episode of Leading Learning, Celisa talks with Ray about the evolving role of learning businesses, continuing education, and online learning— particularly when it comes to workforce development issues and the skills gap. They also discuss how advances related to artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, badges, blockchain and more are impacting the future of learning. To tune in, just click below.

Teachers don’t always know how well their methods work. They can ask questions and hand out tests, of course, but it’s not always clear who’s at fault if the message doesn’t get through. AI might do the trick before long, though. Dartmouth College researchers have produced a machine learning algorithm that measures activity across your brain to determine how well you understand a given concept. The team started out by having rookie and intermediate engineering students both take standard tests as well as answer questions about pictures while sitting in an fMRI scanner. From there, they had the algorithm generate “neural scores” that could predict a student’s performance. The more certain parts of the brain lit up, the easier it was to tell whether or not a student grasped the concepts at play.

A new report from the Strada Education Network, Lumina Foundation and Gallup says that American adults who hold certificates and certifications, but no college degree, report better employment and lives than those without certificates. Lumina says that five percent of individuals without a college degree have a certificate. The report is based on the Strada-Gallup Education Consumer Survey of U.S. adults. The survey looked at Americans’ educational experiences and attitudes. It involved almost 64,000 participants, ages 25 to 64. No one in the group had a college degree nor were any in college. All were working. It found that adults without a college degree, who have a certificate or certification, have higher full-time employment rates than others with no credentials. The report says they have higher yearly wages. It also says they believe their education path was valuable, and would advise others to follow.

“[Higher] education costs are rising in the U.S., as is student debt,” says American venture capitalist Mary Meeker. The average annual cost of a private four-year college (tuition and on-campus housing) is more than $50,000 and a public college averages just over $24,000 a year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. More than two-thirds of the class of 2018 borrowed money to go to college, according to Student Loan Hero. 2018 graduates owe an average of $29,800 and 14 percent of their parents owe an average of $35,600 in loans taken out through the federal government. Education costs chartBecause continuing your education after graduating from high school is getting more and more expensive, Meeker says “post-secondary education enrollment is slowing, and online education learning institutions are expanding their reach.” That reach is expanding as the skills needed to get a good, relevant job continues to change.

Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election woke up Americans to the threat of disinformation, especially from Russia. But almost three years and many more interference campaigns later, the United States still lags in responding to malign foreign influence in the information space, argue Alina Polyakova and Daniel Fried. This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.

According to Forbes, Coursera’s 2018 estimated revenue is around $140 million. (In our analysis of Coursera in 2017, Class Central estimated Coursera’s 2017 revenue in the range of $100 million.) By the end of 2018, Coursera had an active catalog of 3100 courses and 310 Specializations, 12 master’s degrees announced, and over 1,500 enterprise customers (including over 60 Fortune 500 companies), up from 500 at the end of 2016.

In a recent survey, 90 percent of faculty reported that textbook affordability is a concern for their institution. Yet just 40 percent said their school has a program focused on reducing textbook costs. That’s according to the second annual FlatWorld Textbook Affordability Study, in which the learning materials publisher polled 786 faculty members at two- and four-year institutions across the country about their attitudes toward textbook costs.

In our experience, AI can be a huge help to the leader who’s trying to become more inwardly agile and foster creative approaches to transformation. When a CEO puts AI to work on the toughest and most complex strategic challenges, he or she must rely on the same set of practices that build personal inner agility. Sending AI out into the mass of complexity, without knowing in advance what it will come back with, the CEO is embracing the discovery of original, unexpected, and breakthrough ideas

Hiring is Changing. This issue has become more and more common as students are attempting to gain good jobs, but lack a way to effectively communicate what they know and can do. This is due to the fact that employers are engaging in skills-based hiring and using new technology find candidates in a digital world. Today’s technology is helping hundreds of education and training providers to capture all learning. Colleges and universities are creating Comprehensive Learner Records to meet the changing nature of learning and hiring.

By Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology
At the start of the spring 2020 semester this January, Penn State World Campus will have a new artificial intelligence tool for answering the most common requests from its undergraduate students. A virtual assistant will help academic advisers at the online institution screen student e-mails for certain keywords and phrases, and then automatically pull relevant information for the advisers to send to students. For instance, the AI will be trained to assist advisers when students inquire how to change their major, change their Penn State campus, re-enroll in the university or defer their semester enrollment date, according to a news announcement.

Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire founder of investment firm Blackstone (BX), has given the University of Oxford its largest single donation in hundreds of years to help fund research into the ethics of artificial intelligence. The Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities will bring together all of Oxford’s humanities programs under one roof — including English, history, linguistics, philosophy and theology and religion. It will also house a new Institute for Ethics in AI, which will focus on studying the ethical implications of artificial intelligence and other new technology. The institute is expected to open by 2024.